MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 500 titles—from the silent era through the ’90s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
Open City (1945, 105 minutes)
Starving peasants are looting a bakery to get something to eat, someone offers black-market eggs for sale on a shadowy staircase of an overcrowded apartment house, and the Nazis are looking for any able-bodied men to forcibly enlist into the German army. It’s all symptomatic of 1944 WWII Rome in Roberto Rossellini’s jarringly realistic Open City, voted best picture at Cannes in 1946.
A Nazi platoon arrives at the flat of a suspected resistance sympathizer named Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliaro). He darts up the stairs and precariously leaps from rooftop to rooftop, then drops to the ground to find help from locals who can direct him to a safe house. “Cowards! They even drag the sick from their beds!” cries a woman carrying a basket of washing. “My poor son! They found him hiding!” wails another. “Where will they take him!?”
“I am here to comfort a dying man,” says a Catholic priest (Nando Bruno) to a German soldier guarding the block of flats being searched. “Don’t get excited,” says the Nazi. “We’re only bringing the men down for some fresh air.” A local police officer allows the padre inside. Thinking twice about that decision, a German officer decides to investigate further. “I’ll go up. I’m something of a doctor, myself. What floor did you say the dying man was on, the third or the fourth?”
Dressed in robes, the priest and a young acolyte have entered the apartment of an old man taking a nap. The priest is stowing a machine gun under his bed when the old-timer awakens. “Stretch out! The Germans are coming!” warns the padre. “I’m not dying,” shouts the confused old man. “I’ll live to 100 right in your face. Let them come. I’ll eat them for dinner.” The priest must take drastic measures to insure the cooperation and safety of the old man. The Nazis enter the flat, give it the once-over as the last rites are being read, then leave. “Wake up! Wake up!” urges the priest to the unconscious old man, applying sacramental wine to his lips. “What a frying pan you handed to him,” says the altar boy in admiration.
Meanwhile, outside the apartments, the Nazis have captured all men of conscriptable age and stowed them in the back of a troop truck. Pina (future Hollywood star Anna Magnani) hears her name screamed in desperation by one of the victims as the truck begins to roll away. She emerges from the throng, slaps a Nazi officer in the face trying to bar her way and runs out into the street. She screams, “Francesco! Francesco!” as three gunshots ring out, and she collapses onto the cobblestones. The altar boy (Vito Annicchiaricio) runs to her side, sobbing “Mama! Mama!” as the priest cradles Pina’s lifeless body in his arms.
